full tank

There's no room at the inn. My brain is full. It spills out on all sides and is overheating, shutting down.

I am tuning out while reading, talking to people, in class. Taking notes that look like :
• Virtues of local knowledge approach- allows for acknowledgement of own biases and positionality; acknowledging that it’s going to affect your study...missed notes...tuned out...

This week's been a helluvalot of reading:

"In fact, the institutionalized hostility relations, puik, is often formally initiated (though its causes always lie elsewhere) by such a "pardon me" bet in a deep fight, putting the symbolic fat in the fire. Similarly, the end of such a relationship and resumption of normal social intercourse is often signalized (but, again, not actually brought about) by one or the other of the enemies supporting the other's bird"- Clifford Geertz, Deep Play (this is about two chickens fighting, by the way)

"The luteinized theca cells produce progesterone in episodic burts or pulses, possibly related to LH pulses from the pituitary, while the lutenized granulosa cells produce progesterone in a continuous, sustained fashion known as tonic production."- Peter Ellision, On Fertile Ground

"Saya mau menjalani jalan ke Ubud. Saya tidak suka bebek ini. Dia curiga."

"Sodium is a major positive ion in extracellular fluid (plasma); deficiency: hyponatremia; toxicity: hypertension."

Over 600 pages of it, actually.

And there is so much more to go. Thanksgiving break just means I'm not here. It's not a break, I am learning.

On top of that is always the social. We are such intelligent beings, it is hypothesized, because we have intricate social organization. Think about it- most of our energy goes into, "Did I say the right thing? What does she think about me?" Your grocer's name, your roommate's last crush and what happened between them, how to recover from the last broken heart. Or if it's not the little personal stuff, it's thinking on the broader terms- "Why is there war? What are the relations between the Lese and the Efe?" Increased intelligence, in turn, creates more intriciate social relations- deceit, persuasion, how much truth to tell. And this lays down new neural tracks and on and on. That blah blah keeps my brain busy all the time. (not that this makes me more intelligent- just that we are obsessed with it as humans).

I felt the unmistakable sinking feeling of being overwhelmed in my cultural class today and I considered dropping out. The paper I had finished 20 minutes earlier seemed wrong all of a sudden and it was too late to fix it. I'm being hit with postmodernism (my least favorite theory) and structuralism all at once. I've been having these dreams about planes dropping from the sky. Okay, okay. Done bitching.

So the question of leaving school is like the existential question posed in L'estranger by Camus: do you kill yourself? That's it. And if the answer is "no," then what do you have to live for? It's the bottom of the well and once you realize you can be there and stand on your own two feet, there's nowhere to go but up. That sounds negative, but it's actually really, really hopeful.

I am at the bottom of the academic well (maybe- perhaps it gets worse) and if I decide to stay in, then I have to ask myself what for.

1) I am learning.
2) Being a student gives other opportunites that are fun to take advantage of (cheap ski pass, money (sort of), free health care, bus passes, a social realm etc)
3) I told myself I'm going to do this. It's been a long time goal. Whether or not I stay in for the career of reproducing knowledge doesn't matter. I can take all this and go into a postive-acting future with it.
4) Expanding. Maybe my brain will expand, too, and keep all this in. But at the moment, I am shy from "thinking, letting go," in fear that it won't come back again.

"Optimist: A man who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery."- Walter Winchell